In English and other languages, pre-modifiers must generally be head-final, whereas specifiers need not be, which suggests that modifiers are NOT specifiers. The theory of modification defended here rests on a unified version of Merge triggered by satisfaction of selection features under a Priority constraint and claims that the label is dynamically determined by the object containing unsatisfied features AFTER Merge or Move. ‘Adjuncts’ do NOT exist in it, for modification reduces to complementation. Modifiers are just additional predicates, modifieds are their complements or specifiers, depending on the previous structure of the modifier, and correct scope and surface order, including head-final effects and absence thereof, follow from Kayne's Linear Correspondence Axiom without stipulations like the Head-Final Filter. Empirically and conceptually, this theory compares favourably with major alternatives like Kayne's, Chomsky's, Cinque's or Ernst's, and perhaps deserves consideration within a minimalist programme.

This paper explains several unique aspects of scrambling. Using the scrambling feature (Σ-feature) proposed by Grewendorf & Sabel (1999), I discuss (a) what derives the difference between A-scrambling and DP-movement, (b) why scrambling shows radical reconstruction properties, while an operator–variable relation is established in wh-questions, and (c) why we find several types of scrambling. I propose a Feature Interpretation Principle, which states that a feature checking relationship established in derivation is preserved at LF. I show that the Feature Interpretation Principle, together with the multiple feature-checking parameter of Ura (1996) and the nature of heads, explains most of the unique properties of scrambling.

Determiner-noun agreement in English and many other languages appears to be straightforwardly describable; singular determiners go with singular nouns, and plural determiners go with plural nouns. The situation is more complicated with coordinated nouns, however, since unexpected agreement patterns often result. Our theory makes the correct predictions for English and other languages by combining two crucial insights: the dual nature of agreement features inside the noun phrase (Kathol 1999; Sadler 1999, 2003; Wechsler & Zlatić 2000, 2003) and the distinction between distributive and nondistributive features in coordination (Dalrymple & Kaplan 2000).

One of the fundamental questions on which we linguists disagree is whether or not our subject is useful for education. On one side is a long tradition, stretching back to the classical world, in which the practical benefits were clear and agreed – for example, the early Stoic grammarians aimed to improve literary style (Robins 1967: 16), and the Latin grammarians wrote pedagogical texts for use in school (ibid.: 54). In modern times this tradition is represented by leading linguists such as Tesnière (1959) and Halliday (1964), whose work has been motivated at least in part by the desire to improve language teaching at school. On the other hand is an equally long philosophical tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake, in which the only motivation was a desire to understand language better. Recently this tradition is most clearly represented by two linguists who otherwise have little in common, Sampson (1980) and Chomsky (Olson, Faigley & Chomsky 1991), both of whom have denied that linguistics has, can have or indeed should have any relevance to language teaching.

The aim of this paper is to defend the traditional idea that linguistics has an important contribution to make in language teaching, though I shall not of course suggest that every piece of academic research should have a clear pay-off in terms of practical benefits. ‘Blue-skies’ research is just as important in linguistics as in other disciplines. All I shall argue is that our discipline, seen as a whole, has an important interface with education, and that research whose results cross this interface is just as important as that which feeds into, say, neuroscience or child development. Indeed, I shall go further by arguing that academic linguistics is weakened if we ignore the impact of education on language, so information must cross this interface in both directions. If the interface is important even for ‘pure’ research, it follows that we cannot simply name it ‘applied linguistics’ and leave it to those who call themselves applied linguists. My point is that the debate is relevant to all linguists, however ‘pure’, because if education has a profound impact on language, we should know rather better than we do at present exactly what that impact is.

For better or worse, linguistics is rife with frameworks, each with its own ethos. Two important aspects of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar's are: (1) the search for an explicit and exhaustive account of the intricate syntactic and semantic facts that constitute one's grammar and (2) the hypothesis that general/universal and specific aspects of one's grammar are not qualitatively distinct. This book stands as a superb example of this ethos. It illustrates the fecundity of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (henceforth, HPSG) as a framework and advances our knowledge of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives. It is the most explicit description of the semantics and syntax of any area of English syntax of which this reviewer is aware. It thus sets up a healthy empirical benchmark for other theories of interrogatives. The sixty pages of appendices that detail the grammar discussed in the book and its almost complete implementation in the current version of the English Resource Grammar attest to this empirical bent. Any future theory will have to match it in accuracy before any metatheoretical issues (e.g. simplicity or explanatory adequacy) can be meaningfully discussed. Its precision and comprehensiveness will also, hopefully, lead to descriptions of unbounded dependencies and clause-types in other languages that are orders of magnitude more detailed than those currently available. Ginzburg & Sag's (G&S's) book also illustrates how possibly universal principles (such as the requirement that head-daughters and mothers of a local tree share information) and construction-specific requirements (such as the fact that the scope of